Public, rank-and-file could be shut out of budget debate

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE - Associate Editor

NEW HOUSE members are often caught flat-footed the first time there’s a big fight over a House bill that the Senate has amended and sent back to the House.

The House has three options: It can agree to the Senate amendment, and the bill goes to the governor. It can reject it and send the bill to conference committee. Or it can amend the Senate amendment and send the bill back to the Senate, which can accept or reject the House’s change.

The tricky thing about this is that the normal procedure doesn’t apply if the House amends the Senate version: There’s no vote on the bill itself. Once the House has considered all the amendments that representatives have proposed, the bill is automatically shipped to the Senate. It can all happen in a blink of an eye.

Hold that thought, because understanding that process is key to understanding why the public — along with a lot of House members — might very well be shut out of this year’s budget-writing process in the worst way in decades.

State lawmakers have always had a nod-and-wink relationship with transparency when they decide how to spend billions of tax dollars — $7 billion this year.

Deals get cut in informal conversations in subcommittee, in committee and even while the full House and Senate are debating the plan. Things really go underground when six legislators gather to reconcile differences between the House and Senate versions of the budget, with the two senior negotiators routinely holding private meetings to work things out; the public meetings where those deals are unveiled and approved are little more than a formality.

But secret budget-writing could reach a whole new level this year, not because the process is so much different from usual, but because the circumstances are so different.

The way it usually works is that the House passes its version of the budget, the Senate passes its version of the budget, the House then amends the Senate budget back to its earlier version, and the two proposals are sent to conference committee.

Frequently, revenue projections increase after the House passes the budget. So when the Senate sends its version of the budget back to the House, House budget-writers offer an amendment that changes the bill back to the House version and also spends that extra money.

This is a closed process made worse by the fact that there’s no way to open it up. Remember, the vote on whether to amend a House bill that the Senate has already amended is taken as soon as the proposal is unveiled. This makes it difficult for lawmakers who weren’t in on writing the amendment even to understand what’s in the plan, much less decide which parts they like and dislike and draw up their own amendments to change it. So representatives who weren’t fortunate enough to have been consulted when budget-writers came up with a way to spread the extra money are forced either to go along with that plan or else to reject everything the House had approved earlier and support the Senate version. And the public has no input whatsoever.

It’s bad enough to spend additional money on questionable projects, but let’s face it: That happens even when the process is fairly open. It’s worse to make the wrong decisions about which projects to cut — particularly when not just new spending but existing programs are getting cut. But that’s what’s likely to happen this week, because revenue projections dropped after the House passed the budget, so representatives have to cut $180 million from the budget the House passed in March.

Some House members think the House’s pork barrel projects should be the first things cut. And maybe they will be. But we won’t know for sure until Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper unveils his amendment.

Mr. Cooper has been working for the past two weeks on that plan, sometimes in consultation with Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman. That has led to speculation that Mr. Cooper is trying to craft a plan that the Senate can accept, so the bill won’t have to go to conference committee. If that happened, there would be no more public debate over how $7 billion is spent.

Mr. Leatherman and Mr. Cooper both scoffed at that idea when I talked to them on Thursday, though neither completely denied it; Mr. Cooper told The Associated Press a day earlier that the two of them had narrowed their list of differences to about 10 items.

For his part, Mr. Cooper says he doesn’t see a practical alternative to his drawing up a plan to present to the House whole. It would take several weeks if he sent the budget back to his committee to make the cuts, he said, and it’s possible that this is true.

But here’s what is quite practical: Once Mr. Cooper finishes his plan — whether it has Mr. Leatherman’s blessing or not — he could release it to his fellow House members and to the public, complete with the spreadsheets and summaries that his staff produces at other points in the process. And then he could ask that the vote be delayed until next week.

Otherwise, this process could rival the previous modern-day record for secret budget-writing. Back in the 1980s, the Senate kicked the public out and went into a closed-door session to discuss the budget. The public was clearly in the dark, but at least then the senators themselves had some idea of what they were talking about.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.